What would you do if a journalist called you out for lifting published content and repackaging it as part of a bylined article?

The prudent first step would be investigating whether it’s true.

When journalist Zack Whittaker accused Check Point of “borrowing” content from a WIRED article for a corporate byliner, Ekram Ahmed, head of PR for Check Point, took this course of action and discovered that it was true.

To Ahmed’s credit, he recognized that the sooner he came clean with the journalist, the sooner he could put the unfortunate event behind him. With this in mind, he wrote the following treatise to Whittaker:

Hi Zack — just left you a voicemail.

I’m head of PR, USA at Check Point. Recently, we pitched a by-line, thought leadership summary about election hacking by our agency on record, Method Communications. It has come to our attention, regrettably, that after it was pitched, that 62 words out of the total 1228 words were not given proper attribution to a 2018 article written by a journalist at WIRED.

At Check Point, we take our content and its creation extremely seriously. To learn that someone in our organization accidentally left out an attribution is a serious matter and we consider this as such. We’ve launched an internal query here at Check Point to get to the bottom of this to ensure this never happens again. We have notified WIRED and we wanted to be upfront with you about what happened.

We value our relationship with you and the broader media community and this one unfortunate incident does not represent our values, and how we treat external information used by our content writers. We are very sorry. We look forward to working with you on future, exciting pieces. Please don’t hesitate to call me about this if you want to chat further. In fact, I’d prefer to chat via phone if you have the time.

Breaking down the note for lessons learned:

Trying to rationalize the act as less egregious by pointing out that “62 words out of the total 1228 words” were plagiarized does not help the cause. There’s a great line in a Berkshire Hathaway Annual Report, “Are we supposed to applaud because the dog that fouls our lawn is a Chihuahua rather than a Saint Bernard?”